"In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens further the conversation about normality instigated in the twentieth century by philosophers Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, then expanded by race studies, queer theory and disability rights. Cryle and Stephens introduce a needed precision, examining the divide between normal as an average and normal as an ideal to which we should all aspire. They point to the real consequences — from eugenics to heteronormativity to genocide — of this prevalent concept...
their fastidiously gathered evidence proves that normality has always been riddled with internal contradictions. Thus Cryle and Stephens present the etymology and genealogy of a word, the history of an idea, the cultural linguistics through which those threads have become entwined and the sociological ramifications of those subjectivities...
It was around the turn of the twentieth century, as the medical ideal met the mathematical idea, that people began to conflate the typical and the optimal. Cryle and Stephens trace how the meaning of the term ‘normal’ shifted, and how the statistical average became an aspiration."
Weird, it just now occurs to me, "normal" was a statistical term before it developed a common usage.
FB: A book review in Nature, written by Andrew Solomon ♥ " The authors reckon with the divide between statistical measurements and the language of moral superiority."
No comments:
Post a Comment